Charles, a vintage MG roadster and holidays in Mexico.
But then something happened. Something changed. You looked at his life, it was like reading a piece of paper held over a candle. Everything turning brown, burning through from the center, coming apart. All of a sudden there was never enough money. Payments on credit cards got later, smaller, while finance charges kicked them into overdrive. Rent got paid only on demand. NOPSI, the phone company, and Cox Cable monthly threatened to discontinue service if. And Daryl was out hustling jobs-TV commercials, trade shows-he wouldn't have touched with gloves on a year ago.
'Begin to look familiar?' Walsh said.
'Gambling or drugs. A second life.'
'You got it.'
Looking out the window, I remembered at some point during the night rousing sufficiently to kick away covers. Now the temperature continued to rise, as rapidly as yesterday and the day before it had dropped. Bright sun, a riot of bird calls. Japanese tulip trees soon would be in bloom. Each year they came first, lugging the scenery of spring onstage. Weeks later, azalea followed: squat, graceless bushes at roadside exploding into heaps of pink, white and fuchsia blossoms.
'We know of any connection between this guy and Armantine Rauch?'
'Nothing on paper. Payne was on the long slide down, though, no doubt about that. Maybe he just fetched up against Rauch somewhere along his way. Kind of thing that happens. There's a good chance Rauch was collecting part-time for one of our local sharks. Sounds to me like the kind of guy who'd get off on breaking an occasional finger. And that would fit in with both their patterns, Payne's and Rauch's. I touched base with our regular snitches, sent some pigeons out. Ill let you know what they bring back.'
'Not likely to be olive branches, I guess.'
'Not likely.'
'Thanks, Don. I'll be in touch.'
He made no reply, but the connection stayed open. Behind him I heard the usual noise and bustle. Ringing phones, raised voices. A steady low rumble, like the sea.
'Don?'
'Mmmm.'
'There something else?'
'Nah, not really.'
'Yeah. Well, seems like I remember someone standing over my hospital bed a while back telling me that whatever else I'd done, the one thing I never did was bullshit him. You remember that too?'
'Yeah. Yeah, sure I do. Remember a lot of things. Things I wish I didn't.' I heard him sip noisily. From his purple, green and gold Mardi Gras mug that read It's a bitch, I figured.'Funny how so much of it just piles up on top of us, Lew.'
Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you: I'd written that in Tlie Old Man,
'It's Danny. He wasn't there when I got home Wednesday night, and I haven't heard from him since.'
I waited.
'Not the first time, of course. Not by a long shot'
'No.'
'But you know that.'
I knew. Just as I knew Don's pain. There wasn't much I could do about either.
'So what am I worried about, right?'
'Maybe things will work out, Don.'
'Sure. I figure, give it another couple days. Then maybe I'll go looking. I have some time coming to me.'
Walsh must have had years coming to him. He routinely worked double shifts, days off, weekends and holidays. The department had to threaten him with suspension just to get him to take his vacation.
'Comes down to it, maybe you'd go looking with me.'
'No maybe about it, old friend. You know that.'
'Later then, Lew. And thanks.'
I hung up thinking how if you weren't careful life could turn into a long chain of laters, one after another, till one day you looked around and there was nothing left, no trace of all the things you'd waited for, pushed ahead, done without.
Too busy with their future to bring her presents, as a friend's poem put it.
I was on my way showerward (as, speaking of poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas would say) when the phone rang again.
'Lewis? Deborah. I'm scrambling for work, running late, which I'm used to, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed last night, which I'm not used to, and that I hope we'll get together again soon. Call me? Bye.'
I stood listening to the dial tone. I hadn't said a word.
I dialed her home number and, when the machine shut up and let me, said, 'Me too.'
Then I put on coffee, along with a pan of milk to warm. Stood by the front window as I waited. Traffic falling off out there now. Three or four cars hurtle past at a time, then the street's empty, a kind of Morse. Housewives in sweaters to their knees with dogs on leashes emerge. Androgynous bicyclers in bright helmets and tights. Then from the kitchen the sound of the coffeemaker gulping through filterand grounds these last drafts of water. Almost forgot. Milk must be smoking, have a skin over it by now.
On the table nearby sat the legal pad I'd been writing in yesterday. Half a dozen empty scored pages remained. The restwere folded to the back. Lines thereon crowded with crossings-out, insertions. New passages written sideways in the margins, circled and arrowed in.
From her street corner, from her seat at some bar or in some hotel lobby, slie watched that other city gather, rising out ofthe night as though from dark water. This was the place, the world, she knew best. Its names and faces, its appointments, its unspoken accommodations.
That afternoon she woke from a dream.
No.
With a moment's thought I struck she and scrawled above it I.
That afternoon I woke from a dream.
Obviously within some large city, but one neither ofus knows on sight, we emerge from the subway. Winter — and breath-catchingly cold. Moonlight glances office and snow. Steam rollsfrom the exit behind us. There'sno traffic, no one else on the streets, though in the occasional high window we see people still at work before desks and computer terminals.
We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My own white mask over a dress ofblack silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing streetlights. Lewis's lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from me, like a train pulling slowly away.
When I was clone, I went back through what I'd written before and changed it all to first person. Nowhere near the simple adjustment I'd thought: whole passages had to be recast, reimagined, rewritten.
I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing-memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn't care.
Often before, I'd written close to my life and at the same time from a distance. What was true, what was not true? or true, perhaps, in some sense having little to do with mimicry, fact, accurate tracings of our lives? There were deeper currents, deeper connections, surely. I fumbled after them.
As from the kitchen came the smell of burning milk.
13
Dr. Lola Park stepped through the automatic doors from the OR in yellow scrubs and a tired smile, looked about, and headed straight for me. Blue paper covers on her shoes. I stood.
'Mr. Griffin. Richard called to say you'd be coming over. I don't know that I'm going to be much help to you, though. I can't even promise I'll make sense, at this point. I've been on call almost forty-eight hours.'
